Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted to every aspect of human life and presents a serious threat to people, businesses and economies across the world.
Business process functions, including finance, supply chain, procurement, human resources, marketing, sales and customer operations are being severely disrupted. Over the last year business operations are still being challenged to ensure the business continuity as everyone cannot operate remotely and for some sectors physical presence of employees are still required to continue the operation.
Role of HR
In such situation the role of People and HR functions in shaping the organizational response can hardly be overstated as employee health and well-being are crucial to the organization’s continuity. Also, it’s important to focus on resiliency and its capacity to reframe its future in the new normal to come and actions needs to be in-lined with the organization’s business continuity planning. In such difficult times to aid human resilience, Empathetic leadership and communications are two key areas that to be focused.
Recommendations
- Take immediate steps to ensure the safety and well-being of employees.
- Prioritize actions that put people first and exploit the capabilities:
- Enable people to work and connect with colleagues from diverse, safe, secure locations.
- Create safe and secure working environments through regular sanitization.
- De-densify workspaces by limiting the number of people working together, curbing large meetings and ensuring that protocols are followed in canteens, elevators and areas of common use.
- Limit all non-essential business travel and client visits.
- Align with local health and safety guidelines
- Identify priority processes and establish a command center to manage a virtual workforce.
- Take action to meet the needs of key stakeholders:
- Identify priorities of critical processes such as employee payroll, healthcare and supply chain etc
- Establish a command center for a virtual workforce to measure quality, productivity, compliance, , people engagement and workforce well-being.
- Be proactive and establish a comprehensive and sustainable customer-oriented plan
- Bring together highly skilled, distributed teams that can log in anytime, anywhere and deliver on customer commitments at scale.
- Build a broader ecosystem around the organization’s workforce to enable collaboration across a broader set of priorities—including healthcare and childcare which lead to improved morale and engagement levels resulting in better business outcome
Conclusion
Adopting a pragmatic, collaborative approach with the strong and active communication strategy are crucial to adapt to run the business in new ways and improve the employee well-being and engagement across the team which contributes to maintaining the business continuity.
References
https://www.ey.com/en_gl/workforce/covid-19-how-firms-can-protect-their-workforce-operations-and-values
[Accessed 02 May 2021]
⦁ COVID-19: Continuity for Operations in Crisis | Accenture (Online)
https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/PDF-120/Accenture-COVID-19-Continuity-in-Crisis-Effective-Business-Services.pdf
[Accessed 02 May 2021]
Amidst the economic disruption being faced due to the COVID-19 outbreak, businesses that can still operate are being challenged with how best to ensure business continuity. In the case of these businesses, not everyone can work remotely, and for some sectors employees still need to go to work. Below we have identified a few appropriate workplace measures that employers can adopt to continue running their operation while minimising the risks of community spread of the COVID-19 virus, sustaining productivity levels, thus protecting the business and most importantly their employees. Author has taken timely topic into consideration and wrote this article.
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